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Sophos Workspace Protection Enables Secure Access for Contractors and Guests

Chris McCormack

Contractors and guest users often require access to your internal or SaaS applications – for short-term projects or during mergers and acquisitions. Granting access is typically the first step in onboarding these workers. However, since their devices are not managed by your team, you can never really be sure what’s happening to the data they are accessing. More specifically, there are two concerns many of you have raised:

  • Confidentiality - providing access to data while ensuring it doesn’t easily leave your application, get saved to a local device, or copied into personal emails.
  • Integrity – enabling interaction with your apps and data, but not from a device that could be compromised

Sophos Workspace Protection, including Sophos Protected Browser and Sophos ZTNA, makes securing contractor and guest access and your data easy.  You can quickly set up guardrails for what applications they can access and establish data boundaries for the data within those applications.  All they need to do is install the Sophos Protected Browser on their device, which takes just seconds, just like installing any other browser, and they will be immediately productive no matter where they are. And you can be confident your applications and data are secure – ensuring it’s not being used inappropriately or accessed from a compromised device.

How You Can Easily Enable Secure Access for Contractors and Guests:

Watch this video for a brief demo of how easy it is to setup Sophos Protected Browser and Sophos ZTNA to access apps such as SSH or RDP with data boundary controls:

Provide Granular Access: You control exactly what applications any given contractor, guest, or team has access to – nothing more and nothing less. Policies are flexible and defined by user/group or by site/app. You can ensure only Sophos Protected Browser is used to access your applications so they can’t be accessed via a third-party browser. This works for all kinds of apps and systems, web apps, SaaS apps, as well as SSH and RDP. Management is easy - you can add new access policies quickly and easily as new users come on-board or decommission them just as easily when they leave.

Establish Data Boundary controls: You can easily add controls to prevent data from being misused or mistakes from happening. In fact, you can ensure all your data stays within the app if you want. You have full control copying and pasting between apps and outside of the browser, along with screen sharing, screenshots, file saving, download and uploads. For example, you can allow contractors or guests to only copy data between your applications in the browser but prevent copying data to other apps, email, or storage on their device, You can adjust these controls on an app or user/group basis to limit contractors or guests more than your own employees, some teams more than others, some apps more than others, or any combination thereof.

Sophos Workspace Protection Enables Secure Access for Contractors and Guests - figure 1

Guard Against Stolen or Compromised Credentials: Enforce multi-factor authentication access across all your applications (both in-house and SaaS) to prevent unauthorized access using compromised credentials.

Prevent Compromised Devices from Accessing Your Data: Easily add device posture assessment criteria to access policies to ensure a device is compliant and healthy before connecting to your applications and data. You can require the device be secured with Sophos or a third-party Endpoint protection product and/or full disk encryption solution (such as Bitdefender or a variety of others).

Sophos Workspace Protection Enables Secure Access for Contractors and Guests - figure 2

Reduce the Risk of Browser and other Attacks: Sophos Protected Browser is a hardened Chromium-based browser that provides a more secure workspace environment for interacting with your applications and data. It’s ideal for unmanaged devices that may be working remotely or in public spaces.


Learn More:

Be sure to check out our other Sophos Workspace Protection articles to help make the most of this exciting new offering.

If you’re new so Sophos Workspace Protection, visit the website to learn more about all the great capabilities and benefits it provides for securing your workers, apps, and data.